AstraZeneca will resume a 300 million pound ($404 million) investment program in the U.K. seven months after freezing the plans in frustration at national government drug pricing negotiations. But Merck & Co., which adopted a similar tack last year, has told Fierce that its own stance hasn’t changed.
AstraZeneca’s change of heart means a planned 200-million-pound ($271 million) construction project in the company’s hometown of Cambridge, England, is now back on track. The six-story block of offices and conference rooms at Cambridge Biomedical Campus was first announced in 2024 and is due to be named after English scientist and Cambridge University alumna Rosalind Franklin, Ph.D.
Plans for the building—which were expected to employ around 1,000 people—were put on ice in September 2025 as part of a wave of industry protests over the outcome of U.K. government drug pricing negotiations.
Since then, the U.K. government has struck a deal with the Trump administration that sees prescription drugs imported to the U.S. exempted from tariffs for three years in exchange for the U.K. paying 25% more for new drugs. The U.K. government has also agreed to a new rebate rate for new medicines of 14.5% of sales to the national health service in 2026, down from 22.9% in 2025.
In a first-quarter earnings call with journalists this morning, AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot specifically tied both of these developments to the pharma’s decision to reverse its stance on its own U.K. investment.
“We want to recognize the importance of the U.S.-U.K. deal on pharmaceuticals, and the leading role this plays in ensuring increased spending on new medicines and driving access to new therapies,” Soriot said.
“We would like to thank the British government for their efforts to improve access for patients, including four new approvals since the beginning of the year across the U.K.,” Soriot added. “We look forward to further enhancing the access and the reimbursement environment and build a strong life sciences sector.”
The £300 million U.K. investment outlined today not only includes the Cambridge site, but also money for the pharma’s site in Macclesfield, England, which will involve “a lab of the future that will use digital and data tools to advance drug development,” Soriot said.
When asked by Fierce whether Soriot had tried to persuade U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer about the importance of reassessing drug reimbursement policy during their joint trip to China in January, the CEO said he “had a chance to, of course, talk to the prime minister.”
However, the trip was “not where the case was made,” Soriot added, noting that AstraZeneca and “many other companies in the industry” had been addressing this issue at all levels of the U.K. government.
Other drugmakers that took similar action to AstraZeneca included Merck & Co., which canceled R&D operations in the U.K., including plans for a 1 billion pound sterling ($1.31 billion) R&D center in London. A Merck spokesperson told Fierce this morning that the U.S. pharma has “no updates to our previously announced plans.”
